Many professionals are recommending that you reduce the amount of time your child spend online, with computer like devices, unless it is for homework, and watching TV. The Internet and social media is doing some strange things to the brain. It may affect concentration and the ability to read, and then even people who seem nice and caring are using social media videos to possibly manipulate your child’s feelings by sending out false narratives. First of all, I think the rapid speed of the messages on the Internet and that fact that some are videos is affecting the youth’s attentions span and it could be overloading the brain. I read books every day and have done so for most of my life, but I found that the more time I spent on social media, the more it was hard for me to read short messages with varying sizes of fonts, but I had no problems reading book. It was like with the above standard sized text I have to look at it for a few moments, read part of it, then reread it. That stopped after I stopped watching social media videos, reading messages and only allowing maybe five minutes to interact online, and only using the Internet for reports and assignments. Furthermore, a lot of social media influencers are paid to do video blog. Special interest groups (SIG) may be online tracking your child and digging up information on them. Such as their age, birthday, home address, school, who they knew, who they dated and people who look like them, and even gossip about your child or others. Then they will start having people follow your child in real life, putting on skits, tracking them, pretending to be their friend so they can gather information by asking questions and listening to their conversation. Then they will want to come to your house, look around and draw diagrams of it and report back to their SIG. Also, some SIGs will often pay influencers that your children may know or they may just like, to read scripts to make your child think they are their friend, and after a while it will get more personal and they will pretend they are people your kid went to school with and start telling lies to upset or confuse them. It is very subtle. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

What they are trying to do is preextort your child so he or she can get arrested or sexually exploited. You may even have fan pages, of a celebrity, who the celebrity interacts with ask your child for nude photos and invite them places. Many youths, because they think of celebrities like gods, will go along with this and they have no idea who is on the other side of that screen. Therefore, even if they are adults, it is very important to monitor your child’s social media activity. Just because your child is over the age of 18 does not mean they are mature enough to deal with adults who are even 30, 40, 50 or 60. Think about how little time your child has been on this Earth compared to a 30-year-old, and the fact that you have been protecting and monitoring them all their lives and all the sudden, they have all this freedom, think they are grown and totally unprepared to deal with older adults and have no idea what they are capable of. It is import to get to know your child’s friends, even when they go to college and keep an eye on them. With this being a pandemic and record high inflation, many people are looking to exploit your children sexually or get them to confess to crimes they did not commit. You also have to keep in mind, while most law enforcement officers are good people, not all of them are. They get paid to lock people up, and if they can make easy arrests and convictions, with no danger to themselves, that puts them inline for pay rases and promotions. There are even people who impersonate the police, even drive police cars, so you can never be too safe. If you suspect something is wrong, make sure to check their credentials, such as getting the badge number, name, and the numbers on the car they are driving so you can report them. Also, there are a handful of judges and prosecutors who are corrupt and will push cases through court and force your child to take a plea or send them to a state mental institution, even if they are innocent and sane. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The reason is, if your child does not take the deal on a case that is not even able to be tried in court because it has no merit, then they will send them to a state mental institution and hold them until they deem your child is sane. Then once they are out of the insane asylum, your child will then go back to jail and be held until it is time to go to court and plead. A lawyer will threat your child and tell them if they take this case to court, they will send your child back to the insane asylum to be reevaluated. So, even through the state never had a case, they will make your child plead guilty so the prosecution gets rewarded from pulling a criminal act.  And chances are the story is not over. The police may also keep tracking your child, reading their email and trying to instigate them into getting into fights so they can be arrested and sent back to the insane asylum and claim they are a threat to the community and they can be held until they are deemed sane, which can be months, years, or never. Just depends on someone’s opinion, and hopefully your child does not have problems with others in the hospital because that will make them look unstable. The system has ways to even entrap people who are victims of crime. And you already know watching too much TV is not good for the brain or the eyes. Maybe limit it to an hour a day, only after their homework assignments are done. The function of the brain, Aristotle believed, was to keep the body from overheating. A “compound of Earth and water,” brain matter “tempers the heat and seething of the heart,” he wrote in The Parts of Animals, a treatise on anatomy and physiology. Blood rises from the “fiery” region of the chest until it reaches the head, where the brain reduces its temperature “to moderation.” The cooled blood then flows back down through the rest of the body. The process, suggested Aristotle, was akin to that which “occurs in the production of showers. For when vapor steams up from the Earth under the influence of heat and is carried into the upper regions, so soon as it reaches the cold air that is above the Earth, it condenses again into water owing to the refrigeration, and falls back to the Earth as rain.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The reason man has “the largest brain in proportion to his size” is that “the region of the heart and of the lung is hotter and richer in blood in man than in any other animal.” It seemed obvious to Aristotle that the brain could not possibly be “the organ of sensation,” as Hippocrates and others had conjectured, since “when it is touched, no sensation is produced.” In its insensibility, “it resembles,” he wrote, “the blood of animals and their excrements.” It is easy, today, to chuckle at Aristotle’s error. However, it is also easy to understand how the great philosopher was led so far astray. The brain, packed neatly into the bone-crate of the skull, gives us no sensory signal of existence. We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness. Physicians and philosophers, from classical times through the Enlightenment, had to deduce the brain’s function by examining and dissecting the clumps of grayish tissue they lifted from the skulls of corpses and other dead animals. What they saw usually reflected their assumptions about human nature or, more generally, the nature of the cosmos. They would, as Robert Martensen describes in The Brain Takes Shape, fit the visible structure of the brain into their preferred metaphysical metaphor, arranging the organ’s physical parts “so as to portray likeness in their own terms.” Writing nearly two thousand years after Aristotle, Descartes conjured up another watery metaphor to explain the brain’s function. To him, the brain was a component in an elaborate hydraulic “machine” whose workings resembled those of “fountains in the royal gardens.” The heart would pump blood to the brain, where in the pineal gland, it would be transformed, by means of pressure and heat, into “animal spirits,” which then would travel through “the pipes” of the nerves. The brain’s “cavities and pores” served as “apertures” regulating the flow of the rest of the body. Descartes’ explanation of the brain’s role fit neatly into his mechanistic cosmology, in which, as Martensen writes, “all bodies operated dynamically according to optical and geometric properties” within self-contained systems. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Our modern microscopes, scanners, and sensors have disabused us of most of the old fanciful notions about the brain’s function. However, the brain’s strangely remote quality—the way it seems both part of us and part from us—still influences our perceptions in subtle ways. We have a sense that our brains exists in state of splendid isolation, that is the fundamental nature is impervious to the vagaries of our day-to-day lives. While we know that our brain is an exquisitely sensitive monitor experience, we want to believe that it lies beyond the influence of experience. We want to believe that the impressions our brains records as sensations and stores as memories leave no physical imprint on its own structure. To believe otherwise would, we feel, call into question the integrity of the self. That was certainly how I felt when I began to worry that my use of the Internet might be changing the way my brain was processing information. I resisted the idea at first. It seemed ludicrous to think that fiddling with a computer, a mere tool, could alter in any deep or lasting way what was going on inside my head. However, I was wrong. As neuroscientists have discovered, the brain—and the mind to which it gives rise—is forever a work in progress. That is true not just for each of us as individuals. It is true for all of us as a species. One morning on August 21, 2017, I went with my family to a small park in the middle of San Francisco to watch a solar eclipse. We saw the sky above the buildings turn a surreal silver color. Hundreds of street lamps, flashing signs, and lighted buildings intruded. The street lamps, those new LED lights that give off a bright hyper white light, were the worst problem. It was difficult to feel anything for the solar eclipse through this hyper white filter. The children became bored. We went for ice cream. Later that evening, I went alone to a different park on a high hill. I imagined the city lights gone dark. I turned them off in my mind. Without the buildings diverting me, I gained the briefest feeling for how the moon must have been experienced by human beings of earlier centuries, why would cultures and religions were based upon it, how they could know every nuance of its cycle and those of the stars, and how they could understand its connection with planting times, tides, and human fertility. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Only recently has our own culture produced new studies confirming the moon’s effect on our bodies and minds, as well as its effect on plants. Earlier cultures, living without filters, did not need to rediscover the effects. People remained personally sensitive to their connections with the natural World. For most of us, this sensitivity and knowledge, or science, of older cultures is gone. If there are such connections, we have little awareness of them. Our environment has intervened. Not long after the eclipse I just described, my wife, Anica, was told by her ninety-year-old grandmother that we should not permit our children to sleep where the moonlight could bathe them. Born in preindustrial Asia and having spent most of her life without technology, the old woman said the moon had too much power. One night, our oldest son, Moon Taye-Yang, who was eight at the time, sent an evening at a friend’s house, high on a hill, sleeping near a curtainless south-facing window. He called us in the morning to tell us of a disturbing thing that had happened to him during the night. He had awakened to find himself standing flush against the window, facing the full moon. He had gotten out of bed while still asleep, walked over to the window, and stood facing the moon. Only then did he wake up. He was frightened, he said, more by the oddness of the experience than any sense of real danger. Actually, he thought it rather special but did not like having an experience different from what is expected and accepted, which is not to experience the power of the moon. He had been taught that what he had just been through could not happen; he wished it had not and it has not since. Moon Taye-Yang, like most the rest of us, does not wish to accept the validity of his personal experience. The people who define the moon are now the scientists, astronomers and geologists who tell us which interactions with the World are possible and which are not, ridiculing any evidence to the contrary. The moon’s cycle affects the oceans, they say, but it does not affect the body. Does that sound right to you? It does not to me. And yet, removed from any personal awareness of the moon, unable even to see it very well, let alone experience it, how are we to know what is right and what is wrong? If this very evening, the moon will be out at all, most of us cannot say. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Perhaps you are a jogger. I am not, but friends have told me how that experience has broken them out of technologically created notions of time and distance. I have one friend in San Francisco who runs from his Russian Hill apartment to Ocean Beach and then back again, every morning. This is a distance of about eight miles. There was a time, he told me, when the idea of walking, or bicycling that distance seemed impossible to him. Now the distance seems manageable, even easy. Near, not far. He has recovered a person sense of distance. I have made similar discoveries myself. Some years ago I decided to walk to work every day instead of driving. It changed getting to work into a pleasurable experience—no traffic jams or parking hassles—and I would stop now and then for coffee and a chat with a friend. More important, it changed my conception of distance. My office was twenty blocks from my home, about a thirty-minute walk. I noticed that walking that distance was extremely easy. I had not known that my previous conception of twenty blocks was one which technology had created. My knowledge was car-knowledge. I had become mentally and physically a car-person. Now I was connecting distance and range to my body, making the conception personal rather than mechanical, outside myself. On another occasion, while away on a camping trip with my two children, I learned something about internal versus institutional-technological rhythm. The three of us were suffering an awful boredom at first. My children complained that there was nothing to do. We were all so attuned to events coming along at urban speed in large, prominent packages, that our bodies and minds could not attune to the smaller, more subtle events of a forest. By the second say, however, the children began to throw rocks into a stream and I found myself hearing things that I had not heard the day before: wind, the crunch of leaves under foot. The air was somehow clearer and fresher than it seemed to have been the day before. I began to wander around, aimlessly but interestedly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

On the third day, the children began to notice tiny creatures. They watched them closely and learned more about their habits in that one day than I know even now. They were soon imitating squirrels, birds, snakes, and they began to invent some animals. By the fourth day, our urban-rhythm memory had given wat to the natural rhythms of the forest. We started to take in all kinds of things that a few days before we had not noticed were there. It was as if our awareness was a dried-out root system that had to bed fed. Returning to the city a few days later, we could feel the speedup take place. It was like running to catch up with a train. Which leads me to a principle: namely, that the most difficult words in any form of discourse are rarely the polysyllabic ones that are hard to spell and which send students to their dictionaries. The troublesome words are those whose meanings appear to be simple, like “true,” “false,” “fact,” “law,” “good,” and “bad.” A word like “participle” or “mutation” or “centrifugal,” or, for that matter, “apartheid” or “proletariat,” rarely raises serious problems in understanding. The range of situations in which such a word might appear is limited and does not tangle us in ambiguity. However, a word like “law” is used in almost every Universe of discourse, and with different meanings in each. “The law of supply and demand” is a different “law” from “Grimm’s Law” in linguistics or “Newton’s Law” in physics or “the law of the survival of the fittest” in biology. What is “true” statements in mathematics is different from a “true” statement in economics, and when we speak of the “truth” of a literary work, we mean something else again. Moreover, when President Reagan says it is “right” to place cruise missiles in Europe, he does not appeal to the same authority or even logic as when he says it is “right” to reduce the national deficit. And when Karl Marx said it was “right” for the working class to overthrow the bourgeoisie, he meant something different altogether, as does a teacher who proclaims it is “right” to say “he doesn’t” instead of “he don’t.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

If we insist on giving our students vocabulary tests, then for God’s sake let us find out if they know something about truly difficult words in the language. I think it would be entirely practical to design a curriculum based on an inquiry into, let us say, fifty hard words, beginning with “good” and “bad” and ending with “true” and “false.” Show me a student who knows something about these words imply, what sources of authority they appeal to, and in which circumstances they are used, and I will show you a student who is an epistemologist—which is to say, a student who knows what textbooks try to conceal will know what advertisers try to conceal, and politicians and preachers, as well. Furthermore, I think it would also be practical to design a curriculum based on an inquiry into the use of metaphor. Unless I am sorely mistaken, metaphor is at present rarely approached in school except by English teacher during lessons in poetry. This strikes me as absurd, since I do not see how it is possible for a subject to be understood in the absence of any insight into the metaphors on which it is constructed. All subjects are based on powerful metaphors that direct and organize the way we will do out thinking. In history, economics, physics, biology, and linguistics, metaphors, like question, are organs of perception. Through our metaphors, we see the World as one thing or another. Is light a wave or a particle? An astrophysicist I know tells me that she and her colleagues do not know, and so at the moment they settle for the “wavicle.” Are molecules like billiard balls or force fields? Is language like a tree (some day it has roots) or a river (some say it has tributaries) or a building (some day it has foundations)? Is history unfolding according to some instructions of nature or according to a divine plan? Are our genes like information codes? Is a literary work like an architect’s blueprint or is it a mystery the reader must solve? Questions like these preoccupy scholars in every field because they are what is basic to the field itself. Nowhere is this more so than in education. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Rousseau begins his great treatise on education, Emile, with the following words: “Plants are improved by cultivation, and men by education.” And his entire philosophy is made to rest upon this comparison of plants and children. There is no test, textbook, syllabus, or lesson plan that any of us creates that does not reflect our preference for some metaphor of the mind, or of knowledge, or of the process of learning. Do you believe a student’s mind to be a muscle that must be exercised? Or a garden that must be cultivated? Or a dark cavern that must be illuminated? Or an empty vessel that must be filled to overflowing? Whichever you favor, your metaphor will control—often without your being aware of it—how you will proceed as a teacher. This is as true of politicians as it is of academics. No political practitioner has ever spoke three consecutive sentences without invoking some metaphorical authority for his actions. And this is especially true of powerful political theorists. Rousseau beings The Social Contract with a powerful metaphor that Marx was to use later, and many times: “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” Marx himself beings The Communist Manifesto with an ominous and ghostly metaphor—the famous “A specter haunts Europe…” Abraham Lincoln, in his celebrated Gettysburg Address, compares America’s forefathers to God when he says they “brought forth a new nation,” just as God brought forth the Heavens and the Earth. And some believe that: “A state which in this age of racial elements must someday become the lord of the Earth.” All forms of discourse are metaphor-laden, and unless our students are aware of how metaphors shape arguments, organize perceptions, and control feelings, their understanding is severely limited. When students have thing thoroughly explained to them and know the chains an educations remove from their bodies and are treated with respect at home and at school. One will notice a strange thing. For example, for the first time, America still will really learn languages. And there will be signs of an incipient longing for something else. Science has been oversold. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

The true scientific vocation is very rare, and in the high schools it was presented in technical and uninspired fashion. The students apparently learn wat the are asked to learn, but boredom is not wholly compensated for by great expectations. The new mental activity and desire for achievement has not quite found their objects. One will observe that many of the best students’ dedication to science is very thin. They great theoretical difficulty of modern natural science—that it cannot explain why it is good—is having its practical effect. The why question was coming close to the surface. As a result, although the sole interest of the public officials is in natural science, social sciences and the humanities also are profiting (inasmuch as the universities cannot avoid saying they counted too). A little liberal learning easily attracted many of the most gifted away from natural science. They feel the alternatives have been hidden from them. And, once in the university, they can, this being a free country, change their minds about their interest when they discovered that there is something in addition to science. It was a tense moment, full of cravings that lacked clearly perceived goals. One may be convinced that what is wanted is a liberal education to give such students the wherewithal to examine their lives and survey their potential. This is the one thing the universities were unequipped and unwilling to offer them. The students’ wandering and wayward energies finally found a political outlet. Universities are offering them every concession other than education, but appeasement failed and soon the whole experiment in excellence is washed away, leaving not a trace. The various liberations wasted that marvelous energy and tension, leaving the students’ souls exhausted and flaccid, capable of calculating, but not of passionate insight. It may very well be that one was wrong, that what was building up was only a final assault on the last remaining inhibitions, that the appearance of intellectual longing was really only a version of the most powerful of modern longings—for the overcoming of necessity, tension, and conflict, a resting of the soul from its eternal travail. One still may think, however, that there is more of true intellectual longing, and it only ends in relaxation as a result of our wasted opportunities. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

However, the students who have succeeded the past generations, when the culture leeched, professional and amateur, began their great spiritual bleeding, have induced some to wonder whether their conviction was that nature is the only thing that counts in education, that the human desire to know it permanent, that all it really needs is the proper nourishment, and that education is merely putting the feast on the table. At the very best, it is clear to me now that nature needs the cooperation of convention, just as human art is needed to found the political order that is the condition of their natural completeness. At worst, some fear that spiritual entropy or an evaporation of the soul’s boiling blood is taking place, a fear that Nietzsche thought justified and made the center of all his thought. He argued that the spirit’s bow was being unbent and risked being permanently unstrung. Its activity, he believed, comes from culture, and the decay of culture means not only the decay of humanity in this culture but the decay of humans simply. This is the crisis he tried to face resolutely: the very existence of human as human, as a noble being, depended on one and on other humans like one—so he thought. He may not have been right, but his case looks stronger all the time. At all events, the impression of natural savagery that Americans used to make was deceptive. It was only relative to the impression made by the Europeans. Today’s select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessor look like prodigies of culture. The soil is ever thinner, and I doubt whether it can now sustain the taller growths. Lawrence Lipton tells us that the word “work” always mean copulate. (A job of work is a “gig.”) This is a good thought, for it means that the pleasures of the flesh is feelingly and productive, even though effortful. Our impression is that—leaving out their artists, who have the kind of pleasures of the flesh that artists have—young adult pleasures of the flesh is pretty good, unlike delinquent pleasures of the flesh, which seems, on the evidence, to be wretched. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Animal bodies have their own rhythms and self-limits; in this, pleasures of the flesh is completely different from taking barbiturates; so if inhibition is relaxed and there is the courage to seek for experience, there ought to be good natural satisfaction. One sees many pretty young adult couples (We think they are pretty; some people think they are not.) Since conceit and “proving” are not major factors, there is affection. Homosexuality and bisexuality are not regarded as a big deal (for many people, but some people still adhere to traditional gender roles so that perhaps is something to discuss with your church leaders). However, the question remains, What is in it for the women who accompany these nonjudgmental youth? The characteristic of youth culture, unlike the traditional American standard for living, is essentially for men, indeed for very young men who are “searching.” These young fellows are sweet, independent, free-thinking, affectionate, perhaps faithful, probably attractive—these are grand virtues, some of them not equally available among American men on the average. However, the edgy American youth may not always be the most responsible husbands and fathers of children. There are several possible bonds of intimacy. Let us recall the woman at the Patchen party, who pleaded for someone to help the young man. Her relation to him is maternal: she devotes herself to helping him find himself and become a man, presumably so that he can then marry her. (Typically; I do not mean actually in this case.) Another possible relation is Muse or Model: her edgy American youth is her poet and artist and makes her feel important. This is a satisfaction of her feminine narcissism or male organ envy (she may have given up the spicy tacos with Tula sauce and likes turkey burgers now). However, it comes, often, to ludicrously overestimating the young man’s finger painting and laying on him an impossible burden to become the artist that he is not. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

One sometimes sees a pathetic scene in a bar. Some decent square young workingmen are there, lonely, looking for girls or even for a friendly word. They think that they are “nobodies”; they are not edgy young American men, they are not artists. They have nothing to “contribute” to the conversation. The girls, meantime, give their attention only to the hip, edgy, social, confident young American men, who are not only flashy but sound off so interestingly. However, these talented jock will not make life for the girls, whereas other might make husbands and fathers. If a square fellow finally plucks up his courage to talk to a girl, she turns away insultingly. Mr. Lipton suggests that women follow Jocks as they follow the Rom men. However, this makes so sense, for the Rom men are independent and move with their wives, kids, their animals, and they were (in the ballads) a masterful character. A Rom is not a resigned young man, searching. Finally, of course, there are young who are themselves a little edgy and mysterious, disaffected from status standards. Perhaps they have left an unlucky marriage, have an illegitimate child, have fallen in love with an African American man, and found little support or charity “in” society. They might then choose a life among those more tolerant, and find meaning in it by posing for them or typing their manuscripts. Speaking of culture, in December of 1996, China’s last eunuch passed away, ending a centuries-old tradition of castration as preparation of important civil-service positions. The divine origin of this custom was astrological and led the Chinese to believe that certain stars proved that eunuchism was the route to brilliant career opportunities. From the Yin dynasty (221-206 B.C.) and probably as early as the Chou dynasty (1027-256 B.C.), eunuchs served in the palace, an isolated city the emperor was forbidden to leave. At first, eunuch sentinels called an jen guarded the imperial palace; others, known as ssu jen, monitored the emperor’s harem and punished errant court ladies. The eunuchs had been forcibly castrated and came from either conquered peoples or the ranks of prisoners condemned to lose their male organs for the crime of seducing unmarried women. (The women, still fully sowing their oats, were locked up for the remainder of their days.) #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

The great advantage of eunuchs was their inability to procreate, which meant they would never be driven by ambitions for their children. Isolated from their human families, who could never enter the palace, they could turn to the emperor as the family they would never have. For these reasons, they seemed more trustworthy in affairs of state. They might embezzle money, but at least they would not plot to advance a son’s interest. They might manage some mangled pleasures of the flesh when they guarded concubines, but there would be no women with child as a result. As not-quite-men, eunuchs seemed appropriate buffers between citizens and the emperor, a divinity who could not have contact with ordinary humans lest they notice that he, too, was an ordinary man. After a while, ambitious Chinese took note of splendid career possibilities for eunuchs and began to castrate either themselves or their children, much like students taking exams in the hops of future employment. By the tenth century, a special form of castration was officially recognized. Approved applications went to a ch’ang tzu—a little hut—outside the palace where a freelance, government-certified castrator and his apprentices operated. The patient’s abdomen and upper thighs were tightly bound and his male parts bathed three times in hot pepper-water, an unfortunately mild anesthetic. The future eunuch was placed in a semirecline on a heated couch, and assistants gripped his waist and legs. The castrator stood before his client, clenching a small curved blade. “Will you regret it or not?” he intoned. At least sign of hesitation, the operation was off. Otherwise, he leaned over, made an expert excision, and voila! A new eunuch. With male organs gone, the castrator plugged up the urethra. Then his helpers covered the wound with soaking paper and bandaged it. Now the eunuch had to stand and, clutching the assistants, walk around and around the hut for two or three hours before he was permitted to lie down and rest. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

For three days he drank no liquid, so terrible thirst compounded his suffering. After three days, the castrator unplugged him. If urine poured out, the operation had been successful. If not, he was doomed to agonizing death. Now came the crucial disposal of the pao, or treasure, as the butchered male private parts were referred to. Only the most careless castrator forgot to preserve the male private parts, for without this powerful item, a eunuch could expect no professional promotions. He also needed then when he died, so he could enter the next stage of life complete if not intact. Often, the trauma and torment of his castration drove the thought of his pao out of the new eunuch’s mind and he forgot to ask for it. Technically, it then reverted to the castrator, who routinely sold it to its original owner for a sum of up to eight times the cost of the actual procedure. In the later years, if the pao was lost or stolen, the eunuch would purchase or rent someone else’s to continue in his job. If her survived, one hundred days after surgery, the wound was usually healed. The castrator was now entitled to his fee, which he would not otherwise receive. This sum was so enormous that poor eunuchs, which almost all were, could pay only by installments drawn on the anticipated imperial salary. The typical eunuch was a child or man from a less affluent family, his manhood the price of otherwise unattainable prosperity and power. (Unlike a cultured, high-ranking man, he could not attempt to pass the state exam that admitted me to high office.) After his recovery, the eunuch was sent to the palace. If he was commissioned for a post, his castration date became the birthday of his new life. Sadly, there were no guarantees, and rejected eunuchs faced miserable lives as beggars or petty criminals, despised by society as deficient half-men. At the end of the Ming dynasty, is 1644, twenty thousand castrated applicants vied for three thousand positions. The situation was so critical that the government set aside a park to house those creatures whose manly sacrifice had been in vain. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Eunuchs neither looked for dressed like other men. They wore black trousers topped by a long, gray garment, a dark blue coat, and a cap. Those castrated in childhood were called t’ung cheng, those in adulthood cheng. They all had high voices. Most were beardless and pudgier than traditional men who were allowed to sow their wild oats. Younger eunuchs tended to wet their beds, and the Chinese had the expression “as stinky as a eunuch.” In character, they were perceived to be highly emotional and kindhearted and were said to enjoy lapdogs. They developed a sort of professional camaraderie and sometimes united to intrigue in political affairs. They were said to be so sensitive about their missing male private parts that acquaintances dared not even mention a broken teapot or a tailless dog in their presence. Successful eunuchs, about three thousand at any one time, were employed in a wide range of offices, from engineering, interior decorating, agriculture, cleaning, cooking, music, warehousing, even making toilet paper or caring for imperial cats. Most of these were lowly jobs, yet even the humblest or a formerly depraved eunuch could aspire to one of the few lofty posts, which usually involved direct contact with the emperor. One such powerful eunuch, the Ching Shih Fang, monitored the emperor’s relations involving pleasures of the flesh with his empress and also his concubines and recorded the date of intimacy so that is conception took place, the emperor’s paternity would be assured. At dinnertime, the Ching Shih Fang would select about twenty concubines’ nameplates and offer them to the emperor like an after-dinner delicacy. After the emperor had made his selection, the chosen woman was stripped and carried to the imperial bedchamber on another eunuch’s back. Later, the Ching Shih Fang would call out, “Time is up!” and unless the emperor wished that night’s favorite to bear his child, she was dismissed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Curiously, eunuchs also supervised the emperor’s education in intimate passions using suggestive images as visual assistance. They also taught him speech, table manners, correct behaviour and etiquette, and developed unheard-of intimacy with their great ruler. Ming dynasty emperor Wu was so comfortable with one eunuch, Wang Wei, whom he called Pan Pan, friend that he ignored his counselors if Wang Wei offered different advice. Emperor Ling of the later Han dynasty liked to lie with his head in a eunuch’s lap and called his two special eunuchs “my mother” and “my father.” This relaxed intimacy is not surprising, given the emperor’s alienation from real life and the constant care, instruction, and solace his favorite eunuchs would have provided him since his confined and lonely childhood. Besides the emperor, other members of the imperial family sometimes took a fancy to individual eunuchs. The nineteenth-century Empress Dowager His favored eunuch Li Lien Ying, a onetime petty criminal and shoremaker who had had himself castrated, learned hairdressing, and with his skilled comb, insinuated himself into the Empress Hsi’s heart. For forty years, always with her blessing, Li Lien Ying wielded tremendous power and acquired a fortune through systemwide bribery. Predictably, court jealousy and gossip magnified and perpetuated the stories of such imperial-eunuch relationships, to the point where they reached the ears of even the general population. These ordinary folks, who would never set foot inside the imperial city, despised all eunuchs for their apparent invincibility, their corruption, their physical appearance, and the nature of their deformity. They acknowledged and resented the eunuchs’ power in equal measure and both feared and scorned them as powerful freaks. However, what about sexuality? How did these thousands of humans cope with their surgically imposed celibacy? Some were permanently embittered about their mutilation, a few tried desperately to reverse it. Lao Ts’ai, a hated tax-collector, allegedly murdered virgin boys then devoured their brains, hoping to regrow his male private parts. Another eunuch did the same with the brains of seven executed criminals. Others married and attempted relations involving pleasures of the flesh, sometimes with artificial devices. Some kept concubines. The vast majority, however, were celibates who never lost their desire for intimacy, merely the means of expressing it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

For its initiates, after all, eunuchism was not primarily about pleasures of the flesh. These young men restored to castration only as a desperate means to catapult themselves or their families out of unremitting poverty and up into wealth influence, security, and prestige. About three-quarters were children of impoverished parents, the rest young men ambitions or lazy enough to submit their bodies to the castrating knife. They understood what the operation entailed, but when they weighed a life indulged of sowing their wild oats and hardship against a career without any passionate intimacy that could lead as far as access to the imperial family, choosing no pleasures of the flesh did not seem intolerable. The stories about court eunuchs certainly horrified many, but a few interpreted them as beacons of hope in an otherwise hopeless World. And when prospective eunuchs nodded briskly at the fateful question “Will you regret it or not?” prosperity and power, not celibacy, were uppermost in their minds. And a reminder, when doing reports for college and high school, always talk to a librarian and get some good books on the subject. The Internet is good for updating outdated statistic and getting updates on wars, but one will find most of the information online is not in depth and many of the sites on the Internet have all the same vague information. It is true, you will have more fun once you graduate, have a nice pay check, your own home or apartment, and are of age to go places. You can take vacations with your friends to places like Paris, Rome, and so forth. To their credit, economist have made many notable breakthroughs in the last three quarters of a century. They range from the introduction of game theory to a more sophisticated understanding of feedback between economic factors previously thought to be endogenous and exogenous. They include better models for pricing capital assets, options and corporate liabilities. Nobel Prizes have been awarded for the development of powerful new analytic tools. However, for decades, many met in the idea of a knowledge-based economy with widespread skepticism. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

One can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistic. Notice people are not more efficient that they used to be? You see how long paperwork takes to process? How long it takes someone to come out for a work order? How many times you have to contact law enforcement for them to stop telling you they know you are a victim of a crime but choose to not investigate and are closing the case, but may pick it up at a later date? You can be dragged out in the street bloody and get overlooked. This view brings widespread head-nodding in the profession. Economist have been trying to come to terms with the Third Wave. They certainly missed the Internet and its impact for a long time…But they have a religion now. One of the most fundamental changes in the World that has challenged economists and economic analysis is the growth of the “network industries.” These are industries in which the use of the product increases its value to you. The more people have phones, the more people one can theoretically reach with theirs, which makes all the phones in the network more useful, and therefore valuable. Serious study of such “network externalities” began in the early nineties. As we have already noted, there is a non-rival, undepleteable character of knowledge products. We do not deplete the alphabet by using it. In the case of software, moreover, once the cost of creating it is met, it can be endlessly replicated at almost no cost. This is not the way things work with tangible products, and its far-reaching implications are still not fully understood. A further challenge comes with de-massification and the rapid growth in product customization—pointing toward an economy in which no two products are identical. In theory, each should be priced differently. Arriving at that turns out to be complicated and affects the nature of markets. Next come the effects that arise from the global portability of capital, which have fundamentally changed the way economies work. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Economists are thinking hard about these new problems, but many economists still underestimate the impact of innovation and dynamism in the knowledge economy—how fluid things are…how quickly innovation can change whole industries, reorder terms of trade, and rearrange comparative advantages. Finally, perhaps, they are missing the potential productivity impact of bringing several billion people who are currently living at subsistence quickly into the World information of economy. Most of us do not see the children in South America, Asian, Africa, the Middle East and Africa who are starving. However, if you have the chance, please Sponsor a Child. They will allow you to sponsor a child for about $1 a day and get updates from the child. That money will go to providing them with food, shelter, and education. Dear Lord in Heaven, be praised,  my God, by all your creation which tells of the new life. In its journey through the desert of life, for two thousand centuries, the American people carried along the Ark of the Covenant, which breathed into its heart ideal aspirations, even illuminated the badge of disgrace affixed to its garment with a saintly glory. The persecuted Americans felt a sublime, noble pride in being singled out to perpetuate and suffer for a religion which reflects eternity, by which the nations of the Earth were gradually educated to a knowledge of God and morality from which is to spring the salvation and redemption of the World. Such people, which disdains its present but has the eye steadily fixed on its future, which lives as it were on hope, is on that very account eternal, like hope. If there are ranks in suffering, America takes precedence of all the nations; if the duration of sorrows and the patience with they are borne ennoble, the Americans can challenge the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies—what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actor were also the heroes? God, please guide us in Your truth and faithfulness and teach us, for You are the God of our salvation; for You [You only and altogether] do we wait [expecting] all day long. Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercy and lovingkindness; for they have been ever from old. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

It may have started out as a folding table in the corner, but over the past few years, the home office has become a key element in design in homes across the country. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

We’re talking all about home offices this week on the blog – click the link in bio to read!

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